The Colonel's Mistake (24 page)

Mark bought a new pack of SIM cards for his cell phone and checked into a room at a Ramada Hotel. Larry Bowlan met him there after telling the consulate he was sick and needed to leave early.

“Just like old times,” said Bowlan cheerfully.

“Something like that.”

Bowlan called room service and ordered two Heinekens for Mark, two for himself, and a salad with fat-free dressing. He chain-smoked while he waited for the food and beer as Mark, who’d bummed a cigarette, kept an eye on a four-story limestone building just across the street.

They talked about how screwed up Langley was until around five in the evening when men in business suits—some Caucasian, some Arab—started to trickle out of the building across the street. Most were carrying briefcases. Some were picked up by taxis, others walked. Mark and Bowlan watched them all through binoculars.

As each one left, Bowlan would study the guy and then say, “No.”

This went on for the better part of an hour.

Eventually Mark said, “Larry, you have to pick one. If you don’t, I will.”

Down on the street, Daria waited to be told which one to follow.

Another man left. “No,” said Bowlan.

But then a long snow-white chauffeured Rolls Royce pulled up to the front of the building. A couple of minutes later a man in a dark suit strolled out to meet it.

“That’s our mark,” said Bowlan.

“Are you kidding me?”

Prey on the little guys—the weak, the young, the needy. That was the Larry Bowlan way. That was how Mark, when he’d only been a stupid and idealistic graduate student, had wound up a prisoner of the KGB in Soviet Georgia, forcibly addicted to heroin, sleeping in a deep ditch fouled with his own shit, and watching other prisoners get shot at point-blank range in front of him.

You used the little guys to learn about the big guys. You didn’t start with the big guys.

“It’s not his Rolls,” said Bowlan dismissively.

“How can you tell?”

“Just by looking at it. It’s a white Phantom. Belongs to the Burj.”

“What’s the Burj?”

“The Burj al Arab. It’s a hotel, you’ve seen it.”

“I don’t think I have.”

“Yeah, you have. Just drive to the coast. It’s huge, shaped like a sail.”

“Oh, that thing.”

Mark hadn’t known what it was called, but he’d seen pictures of it everywhere: on postcards, on advertising posters at the airport, even on the room service menu Bowlan had just ordered from. It was an enormous structure, shaped like the billowing spinnaker of
an Arab dhow blowing in from the Persian Gulf. Dubai’s version of the Eiffel Tower.

The chauffeur opened the rear door of the Rolls and their mark climbed inside.

“The Burj has got twelve of those cars, all white, just like this one. The Russian mafia-types and people who’ve never been to Dubai and don’t know any better eat it up. You really know the city, you go to one of the classier places in Jumeirah. And did you see that dark suit he was wearing? No one who’s spent any time here wears a suit like that on a hundred-and-ten-degree day. He’s a fish out of water. Ten to one we can rattle him.”

“If he’s not local he might not even work for Doha. He could be a client.”

“He just came out of their main office. He’ll at least be able to tell us who the real players are.”

“You getting this?” said Mark to Daria, speaking into his cell phone as the Rolls pulled away.

“Don’t even bother tailing him,” said Bowlan. “I can tell you how to get to the Burj. He’ll show up there eventually.”

“Haul ass to get there before him,” said Mark. “And figure out his name and room number if you can.”

Daria took a big sip of her cranberry cosmo and eyed her man.

He had short hair that was graying at the temples. Clean-shaven. Wore rimless eyeglasses and a gold wedding band. Probably in his fifties. A snifter of some brown liquor sat in front of him, but he rarely touched it. His motions as he switched between typing on his computer and eating his dinner were precise and quick.

He had a clear view of her—she was seated at the bar—but he was focused on his work, his eyes darting back and forth as he scanned his computer screen. This despite the fact that she knew she looked awfully good in the black cocktail dress she’d just bought for $600 in one of the ground-floor shops.

She took another big sip of her cosmo. The oversized glass was rimmed with red sugar and the sweet lime-scented booze inside tasted almost good enough to justify the thirty dollars she’d paid for it. And then there was the view—the restaurant occupied the top floor of the Burj and was ringed with panoramic windows. Outside, all of Dubai was lit up in rose by the waning sun: the towering skyscrapers, the palm-shaped island resort just down the coast, the white sands of the Persian Gulf…

In a corner of the room, under a ceiling dotted with primary-colored polka dots, a live band from Oman played a bad reggae version of “Karma Chameleon.”

When a young Arab guy tried to hit on her, she turned him down but it got her thinking of Mark, and how pleasant it could be, in some alternate reality, to just enjoy a carnival like Dubai together. But that daydream soon made her feel guilty, so she forced herself to brood yet again on darker matters, like Astara, and the Trudeau House.

Eventually that line of thought led her to consider how much she hated the mullahs in Iran. Which in turn led her to wonder for the millionth time whether the mullah’s Revolutionary Guard shock troops really had raped her mom, before they’d killed her, all those years ago. Her uncle, after too many glasses of wine, had told her of his fear that it had happened. Evidently rape was a common occurrence at that time because the beasts had believed that virgins couldn’t go to hell, and they’d wanted to make damn sure that was where all their enemies ended up. The fact that her mother had already had a child probably wouldn’t have mattered. They raped plenty of mothers just to make sure.

After swirling that around in her brain for a while, mixing it all up with the alcohol, Daria eyed the excess around her and decided she hated Dubai. Her mother had never known anything except Tehran—a dirty, crowded city ruled by the Shah and then the mullahs. The thought that her mother had never really been able to experience anything of the wider world made Daria want to hurl her frilly cosmo glass into the mirror behind the bar.

Mark’s call interrupted her thoughts. She answered using the earpiece hidden beneath her hair.

“Status?”

“He’s eating dinner. I’m watching him from the bar.”

“Why didn’t you call in?”

Daria checked her watch. The time was 6:47 pm. She’d said she’d call with an update by 6:45.

“I got distracted. Decided to have a drink.”

“Jesus, Daria. Focus.”

“I’m plenty focused.”

“Do you need me?”

“No.”

“Name and room number.”

“I’ll get it.”

She finished her drink, ordered a bottle of Pellegrino water instead of the second cosmo she wanted, and observed the flow of the restaurant for the next half hour while Rolls Royce Guy slowly pecked away at his dinner. At some point she realized that the clientele was divided between hotel guests and people who were just there for drinks or dinner. The difference was clear because some paid for their drinks with cash or a credit card, while others were presented with a computer tablet that they signed.

When the waiter came by with a dessert tray, Rolls Royce Guy snapped his laptop shut and chose a crystal goblet filled with what looked like vanilla pudding.

Daria called for the bartender.

“Offer a drink to the gentleman in the restaurant seated by himself,” she said. “Anything he likes.”

Upon delivery of the message, Rolls Royce Guy flashed Daria a polite smile and shook his head awkwardly in what could only be interpreted as a gentle rebuff.

Which she’d expected. But it didn’t matter. She’d made him uncomfortable. That was all that mattered. She took out her phone and switched it to camera mode.

A few minutes later Rolls Royce Guy finished his dessert and asked his waiter for the check. Daria palmed her phone and approached his table just as he was signing a computer tablet.

She lightly touched his shoulder, bent down far enough into his personal space so that she knew he’d be rattled, so that he could feel her breath on his cheek, and said, “I’m certain we’ve met before. It was London, wasn’t it? The Grosvenor House?”

“I haven’t been to London in five years, Miss.” He smiled uneasily as he placed the computer tablet back on the table.

“If not London, then was it here?” In a low voice that she gauged was somewhere between seductive and pathetic, she said, “I wouldn’t forget a face like yours.”

Rolls Royce Guy stole a quick, embarrassed glance at her breasts and said, “Miss, ordinarily I’d love to talk, but the honest truth is that I am up to my eyeballs in work.”

In the glass-walled panoramic elevator that led down from the restaurant atop the Burj al Arab, Mark watched as Daria pushed a few buttons on her phone and then showed him the display.

“His check,” she said.

Mark squinted. “I can’t read anything.”

Daria cropped it so that only the relevant portion remained, and then she enlarged that section and clicked on a filter that sharpened all the lines in the image.

They were able to determine that Rolls Royce Guy had eaten a meal of assorted seafood canapés, followed by a Wagyu beef tenderloin. He’d indulged in one snifter of Lagavulin single-malt scotch, followed by a white chocolate mousse. The meal, with tip, had cost $227. At the bottom of the page was an indecipherable signature, beneath which it read:

Deluxe Suite, Room 302

Waltrop, Stewart R.

“Got him,” said Mark, thinking that he’d show up at Waltrop’s room later that night, flash his old CIA identification card and diplomatic passport, and start pressuring the guy.

Meanwhile, Daria was already Googling “Stewart Waltrop.”

The search didn’t return a single direct hit.

So she Googled “Waltrop” by itself and got over a million hits.

When she tried “S. Waltrop” five direct hits came back, but they were all obscure references to a German town.

“Try Stu Waltrop,” said Mark.

Thirteen direct hits popped up. Five had something to do with the German town. The rest were related to an executive vice president who worked in the business development unit of an Oklahoma-based company called Richter, Inc.

That Stu Waltrop had attended an oil services industry conference in Houston the previous April. And he’d been quoted in
Oil and Gas Journal
as being optimistic that Richter’s new line of roller-cone drill bits would soon turn a profit for the company. His e-mail was listed on a contact page associated with the company’s website.

Daria followed the links to Richter’s homepage. And it was there, at the top of the page, right under the flashy Richter banner, that Mark read the words
Partners in Progress
, followed by what he recognized as the logo for Holgan Industries.

“Well, would you look at that.” Holgan Industries was the largest oil services company in the world, he knew. An American firm, but headquartered in Dubai.

Daria’s eyes narrowed a bit.

She clicked on the
Partners in Progress
link and was taken to a page that explained that Richter, Inc. had recently become a valued member of the Holgan Industries family.

Since Holgan supplied tools and know-how to nations and companies that pumped oil out of the ground, it made sense to Mark that Holgan would be interested in a firm like Richter.

What didn’t make sense to him was the connection—if there was any—between Holgan and the Doha Group. They were both oil services companies, so they should have been competitors.

“Go to the SEC’s website. See if Holgan and the Doha Group have done any deals together.”

Daria followed the links until she got to a page that allowed her to search all of Holgan Industries’ filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. There were thousands. Starting with the most recent and working back, she searched each for the word
Doha
. It didn’t take long to get a hit.